The University faculty voted at their meeting on Thursday to make the Gateway Scholars program, which began as a pilot last year, permanent. The program will be reviewed by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in three years, according to an e-mail to the Justice from Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe. According to an overview of the program presented at Thursday's faculty meeting and attached to Jaffe's e-mail, the Gateway Scholars program is intended to "attract and admit high-performing talented international students who were qualified to be at Brandeis but needed focused attention on their English language skills to succeed fully here." Prospective students do not apply specifically to the Gateway program, but are identified from the general applicant pool as "students who meet Brandeis admissions standards except for their English skills," according to the overview.

All students enrolled in the Gateway program participate in English as a Second Language courses during the summer prior to their first year at Brandeis; these courses are intended to improve "their skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing in English," according to the overview.

Nancy Nies, director of the ESL program and a member of the committee overseeing the Gateway program, said in an interview with the Justice that the summer program includes 25 hours of instruction per week dedicated to language comprehension courses over 6 weeks. The courses deal with academic material such as articles, novels, and poems that would normally be encountered at Brandeis. "The purpose of the summer is to both advance their English proficiency, but also to acclimatize them to the cultural norms of the American classroom," said Nies.

Nies said that in many other cultures, classroom instruction is based on repetition of what the teacher says but that at Brandeis, much of the instruction is based on exploring new ideas and participating in the classroom setting. She explained that this difference can be very "culturally unnerving for people who are not accustomed to that." Nies also said that writing norms in other countries can be much different from those in the United States in terms of the ways in which papers and other academic writing is structured and how arguments are presented.

According the overview, "Students who make sufficient progress based on this summer program transition to regular Brandeis student status in the Fall semester." Students who are judged to need more instruction continue Gateway coursework in the fall semester while also enrolling in two regular Brandeis courses. Nies said that the Gateway coursework completed by students counts toward academic standing at Brandeis but does not count for credit and is not factored into the students' grade point averages.

In the program's first year, 10 of 39 Gateway students fully enrolled in Brandeis courses in the fall semester, according to the overview presented at the faculty meeting. This year, 22 of 46 students were fully enrolled in the fall semester.

Both sets of students are provided with additional ESL support throughout their first year at Brandeis and into their sophomore year.

According to the overview, students continuing with Gateway coursework receive ESL tutorials twice a week in the fall, once a week in the spring semester, while enrolled in a composition course and once a week the following fall while enrolled in a University Writing Seminar. Students who have moved on to a full Brandeis course load receive ESL tutorials once a week throughout their first year. Nies said that these students may also be supported into their sophomore years.

Nies said that, as Brandeis becomes more globalized in its focus both in terms of the work students do on campus and in the number of international students at Brandeis, it is important to have a program that supports outstanding students who lack only the necessary English proficiency to succeed at Brandeis. "This . diversifies the campus in a very rich way by bringing very strong and capable students to campus," said Nies.

Jaffe has established a committee of staff and faculty that will provide oversight and guidance for the program. In 3 years, the program will be reviewed by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.